Untitled

Before beginning this painting, I had furiously declared a war on trees – deciduous trees, specifically, because they are a pain in the neck to paint, particularly with a pallette knife, which is all I have used since July 2011. I may have mentioned this earlier, elsewhere, but once you get into the upper reaches of branches, what your eye beholds is not an object (branches) in empty space, but a RELATIONSHIP – between your eye and the light, which changes the colour of the sky and the colour of the branches. If you look at specific branches against the blue sky, the contrast looks so marked you think you could paint the branch almost black and the sky almost white. But this is a trick, a falsehood your eye constructs. It is within the context of the overall tree that the two elements seem in sharp contrast – but outside that narrow context in which you behold them – that is, if you look at the bit of branch against sky as a part of the whole canopy of tree – you will see that the values are really in a very limited range. So the question becomes, do you paint what you see when you focus on each bit? Or do you paint what you think you see, when contemplating the whole? This painting was the first time I really shot to paint the effect, what the Whole looks like, as opposed to carefully representing each part. And that was good, and my teacher Mr.Curtis said this was my most successful tree yet. And perhaps it is, but I still don’t like it. However, I’m learning, and this represents progress.